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Chinese Premier Says Seizing Peasants' Land Provokes Unrest

SHANGHAI, Jan. 20 - Land grabs by officials eager to cash in on China's booming economy are provoking mass unrest in the countryside and amount to a "historic error" that could threaten national stability, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in comments published Friday.

His message underscored the increasing urgency of the government's campaign to curb abuses against peasants and migrant workers, roughly two-thirds of China's 1.3 billion people, who have relatively little to show for one of the most spectacular economic expansions in history.

Mass uprisings and riots over pollution, corruption and seizures of farm land have risen sharply in recent years and prompted growing worries in Beijing that economic growth alone is no longer enough to ensure social stability and the Communist Party's grip on power.

"We absolutely cannot commit a historic error over land problems," Mr. Wen said in an address delivered to a party meeting in late December and released in Chinese newspapers on Friday. "In some areas, illegal seizures of farmland without reasonable compensation have provoked uprisings. This is still a key source of instability in rural areas and even the whole society."

His statement amounted to a blunt admission that efforts by Mr. Wen and President Hu Jintao to address the country's yawning wealth gap and improve conditions for the majority of China's people had fallen far short of their goals, despite being a centerpiece of government policy for three years.

Local officials operate with impunity in the one-party state and have little to fear from a legal system that answers to the party. Endless exhortations by central government leaders to pay more attention to inequality have done little to address the root causes of the wealth gap and surging social unrest, Chinese and Western political experts say.

Mr. Wen said the fast-paced expansion of China's cities had involved "reckless occupation of farmland" and the sacrifice of fertile acreage in a country that strives to produce enough to feed itself without relying heavily on imports. The government said in 2004 that new factories, housing, offices and shopping malls had consumed about 5 percent of the total arable land in the previous seven years.

Such warnings are not new, and Mr. Wen did not announce any fresh steps to curtail land seizures, which many experts say stem from deep-seated problems in the way China manages land.

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In the last two years China abolished taxes on peasants and staple farm crops, relieving one historic source of grievance in the countryside. But even that advance, Mr. Wen said, risks being undermined by local officials who impose "arbitrary fees" on farmers.

Average rural incomes are less than one-third of urban incomes and are growing more slowly. The wages of rural migrant workers, the backbone of China's giant construction industry and its surging factories that make goods for export, have stagnated for a decade despite nearly double-digit economic growth.

Meanwhile, the cost of health care and education have soared, making secondary education and basic medical treatment unaffordable luxuries for hundreds of millions of people.

Mr. Wen mentioned all of those problems in his address and said the government must make raising rural living standards a top priority.

"In the final analysis, we must protect the democratic rights and provide material benefits to rural citizens," he said. "Improving rural quality of life and ensuring social fairness and justice are extremely important and urgent tasks."

Peasants are not allowed to own the land that they farm and have little say if the government decides to sell it for commercial development. Compensation is assessed according to complex formulas but rarely approaches the market value of the land, leaving many feeling disenfranchised by the development around them.